09. September 2021 / 00:00 — 00:00

ISLAND or Infrastructure’s infrastructure

Installation with Valentina KargaPariser Platz ↗︎

Valentina Karga, draft of ISLAND, 2021 © Valentina Karga

ISLAND is a micrograph of our Earth, a self-contained, materially closed ecosystem, floating in the sea of the universe. All matter that it is made out of, cannot be destroyed or disappeared, only transformed, in ways that support or prevent life. The structure is made with borrowed soil and rammed into a pixel-like island, the shape is reminiscent of the aesthetics of computer games. Cartesian thinking, post-modernism and brutalism, a kind of conglomerate of all the values that have influenced our contemporary culture, are distilled into its geometric form. The public is invited to participate in expeditions to this island, to get to know it, and, if they want, change it, reshape it, ‘terraform’ it, meaning making it again earth-like and in so able to support all planetary life by preventing coming catastrophes.

All materials we use to create our world with, eventually come, in some form, from the Earth. Human-made infrastructures extract, organize, transport and distribute natural resources for human use. Sometimes, because of (neo)colonialism, modern infrastructure confronts indigenous cultures, other species and fossil fuels, killing them, bringing them to extinction or exhausting them in the name of modernity, progress and economic growth. Uneven distribution of resources causes violence leading to trauma, which is then resolved with greed and addiction, instead of love. A society of trauma and addiction leads to disconnection from one self, and from the nature we actually are. Disconnected from our animal bodies, we can’t feel enough empathy for whom we loose, fellow cultures and non-human kin, which we conveniently have been gaslighted to think of as ‘other’.

On which values will the future designed, anthropocentric infrastructures be based? Will they be structures of destruction or of regeneration? Valentina Karga invites to participatory expeditions to the island - to a kind of philosophical game, questioning, mediating.


Valentina Karga
ISLAND or Infrastructure’s infrastructure
The installation can be visited continuously, from 09 to 19 September 2021.


WORKSHOPS

ISLAND – Rammed Earth – Workshop: 05.09.2021 / 10 - 6 pm

ISLAND – Rammed Earth – Workshop: 06.09.2021 / 10 - 6 pm

ISLAND – Rammed Earth – Workshop: 07.09.2021 / 10 - 6 pm

ISLAND – Rammed Earth – Workshop: 08.09.2021 / 10 - 6 pm

ISLAND – Rammed Earth – Workshop: 09.09.2021 / 10 - 6 pm

Terraforming – Workshop: 18.09.2021 / 11 - 2 pm

Pariser Platz
Europaviertel
70173 Stuttgart

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